MoAT: Meta-Evaluation of Anti-Malware Trustworthiness

Sharon Lin, Christof Paar

Abstract: Many studies have proposed methods for the automated detection of malware. The benchmarks used for evaluating these methods often vary, hindering a trustworthy comparative analysis of models. We analyzed the evaluation criteria of over 100 malware detection methods from 2018-2022 in order to understand the current state of malware detection. From our study, we devised several criteria for evaluating future malware detection methods. Our findings indicate that a finer-grained class balance in datasets is necessary to ensure the robustness of models. In addition, a metric robust to distribution shifts, e.g. PR-AUC, should be used in future studies to prevent the inflation of results in unrealistic distribution regimes. The composition of datasets should also be disclosed in order to ensure a fair comparison of models. To our knowledge, this study is the first to assess the trustworthiness of evaluations from multi-domain malware detection methods.